Firefox HTTPS error ssl_error_rx_record_too_long

I just had an interesting problem when accessing a HTTPS (SSL) service in Firefox. I got the following error message.

SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length.
(Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long)

It turned out the the HTTPS service (on port 443) was not actually a HTTPS service and it was configured as a normal HTTP service. The initial connection from the browser was communicating in HTTPS, and expecting a security certificate, but instead it was getting back the normal HTTP “Bad Request” HTML. A confusing error message, but an easy problem to fix.

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This entry was posted on March 11, 2009 at 2:58 am and is filed under Web.
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peatuhacssaid

dwightsaid

I hit this on my debian installation. If you look in /etc/apache2/sites-available and sites-enabled/, make sure that if there is a “default-ssl” in the ‘available’ directory, that it’s also linked in the ‘enabled’ directory. Until I did this, I was getting the error.

basically, apache is listening on port 443, but doesn’t know that it’s supposed to be using SSL on that port, until you configure it to do so.

Stevesaid

I started getting this from socialfixer (Facebook app) today on Firefox but not on iron. I always use https on Facebook. I haven’t done anything to change port 443 to my knowledge. I’ll ask the socialfixer guy if he knows why it’s happening.

Jamessaid

Aaronsaid

Guys, I had this issue running only Tomcat as the servlet engine. I have found the cause of the issue to be format of the SSL connector in the server.xml file. When I pasted in the connector string from my own notes it was failing despite no word wrap on the source notepad string. After finding no useful answers on google anywhere I decided to modify the existing connector in the original server.xml to add the key store and trust store manually and it resolved the issue.

I have seen this error on several machines and was able to successfully fix it by disabling TLS 1.0 (In Firefox go to Options -> Advanced -> Encryption). I still wonder what might cause it, though. The error occured with different sites (not necessarily consistent across machines), even with some embedded servers in network devices. Still would like to find out the root cause of it.